A short update to point you in the direction of our new website for ICO Media, our comprehensive PR service.
ICO’s PR activity has grown significantly since we started it in 2009, but we always kept it under the ICO Partners umbrella, mostly as a way to keep things simple. As it has grown significantly lately, we have decided to give it a proper space on the Internet with the launch of our ICO Media website. It’s light, simple and (hopefully) straight to the point:
So please take a few minutes to check it out: www.icomedia.eu
This is as good an opportunity as any other to remind you all that we will again be at gamescom again this year. You can contact usto arrange a meeting – or just drop by our booth to say hi – we are in the Hall 4.1, booth number A014.
https://icopartners.com/newblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ICO-media.png256710Thomas BIDAUXhttps://icopartners.com/newblog/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CRUSHCREATIVE_ICO_BRANDING_LOGO_NavyWhite-01-e1586189748878.pngThomas BIDAUX2013-08-09 10:59:092016-12-23 19:48:45New website for ICO Media
I have promised to write a post-mortem on the Strike Suit Zero Kickstarter for a while now. I haven’t done so for many reasons, but the main one was that I wanted to have the game out and most of the rewards delivered before doing so. The fact that the game has been released is one of the most interesting points here, and a good way to get a complete view of what the Kickstarter did for the game beyond the campaign.
For lots of reasons outside of my control as well as the studio’s, I won’t be able to share sales number for the game. It is unfortunate but hopefully, there will be enough to learn from here to still make it valuable.
As a short side note, I probably need to clarify my role with the studio: I am a Non-Exec Director of Born Ready Games and worked as an executive producer for the title (not hands on, providing on-going feedback on the project). ICO has been providing the PR for the game in Europe since it was first announced (back in 2011).
The Campaign
Back in September last year, the studio realised that while the game development was progressing fast, it wouldn’t be possible to finish it in the timeframe allowed by its cash in the bank. After discussing different options, we decided to take the issue to the existing community (while it was small, it was there and had been built for the past 3-4 months) and see if crowdfunding could help fill in the cash gap needed to finish the game and add some polish.
The campaign was launched on the 18th of October with a $100,000 objective. It was successfully funded on the 17th of November, with a total amount pledged of $174,804 from 4,484 backers.
The game itself was released on the 23rd of January 2013.
During the campaign, different additional content was promised, either in the initial campaign or through stretch goals:
– The Marauder Strike Suit – DLC for a different Strike Suit ship. Added to the game on the 23rd of March
– The Heroes of the Fleet – DLC of 5 additional missions. Added to the game on the 20th of May
– The Mod tool (as a $130,000 Stretch goal). Available on Steam since the 20th of May.
– The Oculus-support beta (as an optional add-on for a symbolical $1). It has started last week for some of the Kickstarter backers.
– The Mac and Linux support. The stretch goal wasn’t met (barely, it was at $180,000 and the PayPal pledges didn’t add enough to meet it) – so the studio decided to support it but not as a simultaneous launch, as promised in the stretch goal. Mac beta has just started last week.
Overall, the studio has nearly completed the project it was raising money for and it will be all done before the end of the summer.
What worked and what were the unexpected benefits
These are just not mine – I asked Benjamin and Chris from the studio to contribute to this list:
1 – Good planning. Ahead of the campaign, we took a lot of time to research other similar projects (scope and theme) and it helped a lot to create the campaign as well as during the campaign itself. Obviously, it wasn’t perfect as the next chapter proves, but it would have been way worse without all the prep.
2 – Dedicated resource. Jamin (the studio’s community manager) was on the campaign full time; talking to the backers, working on updates, keeping track of requests and questions.
3 – Involving the team in the campaign. Getting them in the video and the updates was good for morale but also showed the identity of the studio.
4 – Excellent PR impact. 47 (in the US) and ICO (in Europe) were managing the PR for the game at the time and the coverage the game got during the Kick Starter campaign accelerated massively.. I don’t think that back then being on Kickstarter was a story in itself already, but it helped support one of the key message : space dog fighting games were once huge and needed to be more represented). Word-of-mouth supported this a lot obviously, some backers asked some media that had not been covering the title to talk about the game and they did. “Game X goes to Kickstarter” is not a story anymore, but if you do have a story to go with your campaign, it will make it possible for the message to spread more easily.
5 – Joysticks. I mentioned this at events where I am talking about the campaign, but the addition of the Logitech joysticks during the campaign created a mid-campaign push thathelped a lot. Just check the numbers below. I think backers loved the idea of having a joystick again (tapping in the same nostalgia sentiment that exists for the genre) – and the game was perfect to play with a joystick.
6 – Studio financial health. Without the Kickstarter money, I have no doubt that the game would have been released, but in a poor state (it was still a bit rough and some may say it still is, so imagine what would have happened) and it would have been at the cost of redundancies or possible worse. The extra money then was essential not just to get a better game out, but to give the studio enough rope to release it properly. It is now in a much better shape and was able to self-finance the stand-alone score chaser based on Strike Suit Zero for instance (Strike Suit Infinity).
7 – Junji and Paul were ace. Junji Okubo is the mecha designer behind the Strike Suit and the ships design. Paul Ruskay is the composer of the music. They both gave us incredible support. Paul waved some of his rights to the music for the rewards of the Kickstarter campaign. Junji offered to design mechas for the $10,000 rewards (that nobody backed, but were still really awesome). They also both shared the word about the game and the campaign. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the highest average pledges came from Japan for instance ($80 per backers on average, compared to $40 for the rest of the world).
8 – Merch. An unexpected benefit of the campaign was the sudden access to a number of merchandise opportunities. While the studio hasn’t made any plans to sell them for now, having artbooks and OST CDs is a nice thing. Meeting with potential partners, being able to give the artbook and say “this is the art style of that game we made” makes it easier to break the ice.
9 – Team morale. I couldn’t judge from this first hand, but everyone mentioned to me how it boosted the team’s spirits. Going from “working on a game we think is cool” to “working on a game that people think is cool enough to support” does miracles.
What went wrong and unexpected problems
1 – Paypal. It went live way too late and was difficult to manage. It was put together in a rush and nobody in the studio had proper experience with it. This was a missed opportunity and had we had it up and running earlier the impact on teh overall campaign could have been much larger.
2 – Lack of some skills within the studio. Nobody in the studio has experience putting websites together. The game’s website was a placeholder (and a bad one) for most of the campaign and when the main one went live, it still wasn’t a good website. The current site is much better, but it was needed most back then, when backers were researching the game beyond its Kickstarter page. It probably didn’t help build up the credibility of the project.
3– Stretch Goals. Because the campaign was to finish the project, not to start it, the studio had very little flexibility on what could be offered as Stretch Goals. When you go to Kickstarter to fill in a gap in your finance to finish the game, you really don’t want to offer to add XYZ that will delay your game again. It limited the capacity for the studio to push for more funds beyond the initial goal. It is still great that the Mod tool could be added as this was a much demanded feature by the community. In retrospect though, maybe more things could have been added, I think we may have been overly cautious there.
4– Unprepared for the Kickstarter back-end. While this wasn’t the biggest of issues as SSZ wasn’t a multi-million campaign, it was still a massive pain. Larger campaigns that have plans to transition backers from Kickstarter to their own backend are really in a better shape to tackle all the requests and micro-management required. The Kickstarter back-end will do so much for you, you need to find your own tools and you usually learn the hard way about the ones that work and the ones that don’t.
5– OST CDs. While I think the rewards were well structured and generally working, I will raise my hand for this one and say “I fucked it up”. We limited the OST CDs to a quite high level ($250), while production of those meant we were going to get a lot more than what the backers would need. Like 950 more than needed out of 1,000 CDs produced. We should have kept the signed CD at that relatively high level and offer un-signed CDs at a lower level.
6– T-shirts and hoodies. While the Insert Coins folks were super supportive, we ended up withtons of delays on the T-shirts. Actually, some have still not been sent as with some sizes, we had quality issues. It mostly comes from inexperience with managing these kind of products – and the delays with them.
7– Pricing. When planning the campaign, we knew the retail price was going to be about $20 and we thought we had prepared that way. We offered the game at $15 for the early bird backers (limited to 1,000) and at $20 as the first price point where you can get the game otherwise, with a few, very anecdotal perks. BUT – when launching on Steam, you usually do a discount, in our case this was 20% off, meaning the game was at $16 at launch… That went way over our heads back when planning (and while we did research what other projects have done, very few had launched and encountered this issue – I now know that others ran into the same problem) and we got criticized by some backers, who were feeling that they were being punished when they had backed the project before anyone and should been treated better. It felt even more painful as they felt the game was almost ready before the campaign and would have launched without their support (they were wrong on this, but that was their perception).
There was also strong support from another part of the backer community which answered the criticism better than the studio could have and basically said they were fine with what happened with the pricing as “Kickstarter is about crowdfunding, not about pre-ordering projects on the cheap”. The plan had always been to be generous and to go beyond what had been promised as rewards, and hopefully it has shown, at least in a small way, with the studio offering discount codes for the new content to the backers for instance. The idea was always to keep backers happy – and the studio has this very much in mind.
8– Rewards system in Kickstarter. We always knew that we would not be able to edit the rewards after the campaign was launched, and we still made the rookie error of referencing some content as “and all previous rewards”. That meant that when we added the joystick, many backers expected to get this when backing higher level rewards, despite explaining it wasn’t the case at different points on the page. I definitely recommend going with the current best practice to name the rewards and reference them by that name when you need to.
9– Kickstarter documentation. There are quite a few things that you need to learn as you do them on Kickstarter. The way surveys work and advice on how to maximize their use could use some love on the documentation side. Nowhere on the site (it was true back then and it is still true now) are you told that after the campaign YOU CANNOT CHANGE THE MAIN PAGE ANYMORE… When you were able to reflect a lot of things moment to moment on it, losing this ability over night, without notice, is a big issue. It didn’t create many problems with SSZ, but it was very annoying. I did mention this to Kickstarter and I suspect they are working on a way to address this while protecting the information that was historically provided to the backers before the end of the campaign and avoid scamming.
Overall, the Kickstarter had a positive net benefit for the project and the studio, no question about that.
The numbers and graphs
I love numbers and graphs (you should know that by now), so let me share loads with you:
Duration of the campaign – 30 days
Number of backers who pledged money during the campaign – 4,484
Number of backers whose payment actually went through – 4,458
Payment that failed – 26
$ amount pledged – $174,804
$ amount paid – $173,872
$ amount that failed to be paid – $932
The failure ratio was incredibly low for the project. No complaints here. The nice folks at Kickstarter said it was generally 2 to 3% of the payment that were affected on average.
Number of backers choosing “No rewards” – 18 (for $335)
Number of countries represented by the backers – 56
Number of countries represented by the backers with physical rewards – 25
Number of backers with physical rewards – 631
Number of joysticks sent – 386
Pledges for physical rewards making 41% of the money raised is nothing to scoff at.
The Kickstarter system does send you an email whenever something related to your project happens. It can be overwhelming if you don’t expect it:
Number of “Kickstarter” emails received during the campaign – 6462
Number of pledges cancelled – 238
Number of pledges decreased – 138
Number of pledges increased – 564
Number of official updates during the campaign – 21
Number of comments during the campaign – 480
That’s about one comment per 10 backers. The project being a ‘help us finish our project’ rather than “help us start our project”, the engagement with the user was quite different. I would expect more comments and more discussions between backers in a “starting a project” campaign.
Number of direct messages during the campaign – 228
Number of “Kickstarter” emails received after the campaign (over 7 months) – 1621
Number of official updates after the campaign – 22
Number of comments after the campaign – 751
Number of direct messages after the campaign – 842
Number of views for the Kickstarter video – 74,822
On Kickstarter – 63,108
External – 11,774
About 11% of the views watched the video to the end. Not bad, especially as those numbers are current numbers, many months after the campaign is over I suspect views have accumulated during the period after the campaign.
REFERRAL SECTION
Top referral sources (as provided by the Kickstarter dashboard)
Backers and funding origins
Kickstarter backers were overwhelmingly from Anglo-Saxon countries: USA, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia represent 73% of the backers and 76% of the money raised.
REWARDS SECTION
Number of artbooks produced – 1,000
Number of artbooks sent – 248
Artbooks production costs – £3,307 / $5,162
Number of T-shirt produced – 320
Number of T-Shirts sent – 302
T-shirts production costs – £2,680 / $4,183
Number of hoodies produced – 200
Number of hoodies sent – 103
Hoodies production costs – £2,400 / $3,746
Number of OST CDs produced – 1,000
Number of signed OST CDs sent – 27
OST CDs production costs – £839 / $1,312
Number of art prints produced and sent – 7
Art prints production costs – £1,407 / $2,196
Number of 3D printed Strike Suits produced – 2
Number of 3D printed Strike Suits sent – 0
3D printed Strike Suits production costs – £450 / $702
Total postage cost (to date) – £1,653 / $2,580
Because the joysticks were managed differently through Logitech, the postage costs doesn’t include them. For reference, the studio sent 385 joysticks around the world – and it cost £3,981/$6,221 all included.
There are still a few things to send (T-shirts mostly) and the final costs for the 3D-printed figures (and their postage) won’t be final until it is actually done, but at the moment, the studio has spent £17,062/$26,641 for the physical rewards. That’s 15.2% of the total raised spent there. Compared to other campaigns, this seems reasonable and within what was expected.
I shared in the past the following graph, that is showing the impact of the campaign on the number of new likes on Facebook:
The orange marks are for consumer events (Rezzed, gamescom and Eurogamer Expo), the blue marks are the release of videos (developer diary, Pax Trailer, and a feature on Athene’s channel) and the grey marks are positive articles in some media. Of everything that was undertaken in terms of communication and marketing (and arguably, this being an indie project, there weren’t a large budget allocate to these), none had an impact comparable to the Kickstarter campaign. As I mentioned before, the website at the time wasn’t very well done and we drove all the traffic towards the Facebook page, so this is the best way to measure the campaign impact comparative to other things that were done.
But that’s an incomplete (and old) picture, so here are is another one, reflecting the effect of the launch of the game:
Because the time period covered is much longer, I opted for a different graph format. You can still see the impact the Pax Trailer had, but it all pales compared to the launch of the game. I don’t have much to add here, if only to say that the release of the second game seemed to have a much stronger impact on acquiring fans than the launch of the first game. I suspect that the commitment of the studio to create more content is what created this effect, but I have no evidence of this. The Facebook promotion that was running at the same time had a role to play as well, but looking at the numbers very closely, it was marginal compared to the release of Strike Suit Infinity itself.
Ideally, I would conclude with sales numbers and compare them with the numbers from the campaign to draw even better conclusion, but as said in introduction, we can’t. What I can say is that thanks to the Kick Starter campaign, the studio is still around and that, in the end, the backers, so critical in getting the game finished and released, ultimately represent a relatively small proportion of people who are now enjoying the game.
https://icopartners.com/newblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/kickstarter_ssz.png256710Thomas BIDAUXhttps://icopartners.com/newblog/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CRUSHCREATIVE_ICO_BRANDING_LOGO_NavyWhite-01-e1586189748878.pngThomas BIDAUX2013-06-24 11:00:112014-09-29 10:01:30Strike Suit Zero– The Kickstarter post mortem
I haven’t had much time to follow-up on the past events – apologies for this. Quo Vadis was great again this year, very interesting discussions there and a LOT of discussions on crowdfunding… That intrigued me, so I looked at the statistics for video game projects and where they are coming from on Kickstarter (the most discussed platform then).
Here are some figures I pulled on the repartition of projects for the year 2012 – they tell quite a telling story:
Despite this domination of the Anglo-Saxon world on Kickstarter, the topic is quite discussed at continental Europe industry events, showing the interest in the phenomenon even if it hasn’t quite reach the ‘Old World’ beyond the United Kingdom.
As proof, I was invited to discuss the numbers of said phenomenon at the Videogame Economics Forum in Angouleme (that’s in France if you were wondering). Event is next week and my own intervention should be preceded by Kickstarter’s director of community, Cindy Au, another sign of the interest for the platform on the continent.
If you happen to be in Paris at the end of May, and you are interested in data analytics for video games, and you understand French, you can also come to the event organized by Capital Games on the 22nd of May. I will introduce the master classes of the afternoon on that very topic.
I have been a bad boy. It has been weeks since my lecture at the Indie Game Summit during GDC and I haven’t put the slides on the blog. Hopefully, anyone interested in them already got a look at them on SlideShare, but I do need to share them here as well, and I need to share more.
I also promised to share the my raw data, which you can find here: Raw Data Spreadsheet
Lastly, I wanted to share the result of the small survey I did with a sample of people whose video game project got funded: Survey results
Now, there are a few things I said during the lecture I would like to rectify or provide some additional some data on…
Payment failures
I think the number I gave didn’t properly reflect the reality. I had a discussion with Cindy Au during GDC and explained I found the variance was large and wondered why. She offered great insight on this and it basically came back to the survey question probably being misunderstood. In my own case, the failed payments were less than half a percent and she said that average was probably around 2% or 3%, I trust her on this.
Success Ratio
At GDC, I had a specific data sample that I had gathered myself that didn’t include failed projects. This has now changed and I have WAY more data. I haven’t processed it all though as I was quite busy since then, but here are a couple of things I can share already:
So, the volume of GBP projects is still significantly smaller than the USD projects, but there were still 21 GBP projects in March. two of which got funded. Meanwhile, there were 99 projects in USD with 22 of them getting funded. They were more funded projects in USD than the total of GBP projects in that period. GBP projects are struggling more to get funded than USD, with March a real wash – despite having seen more GBP projects than the previous month. It might be a self fulfilling prophecy as talking to studios based in Europe, most are considering to launch their projects in USD, including British studios.
Comparing the success ratio of video games to tabletop games, it seems GBP projects have to carve out their place in this ecosystem, but the problem is more pronounced for video games:
Seasonality
Having the data on failed campaigns is very promising in terms of being able to research success factors. A last bit of data we can share today is about seasonality (from what we can see so far).
So, March saw a huge peak is due to Doublefine Adventure. The vast amount of people they brought to Kickstarter basically benefitted a lot of projects that were live at the same time DFA was.
The most significant seasonal effect happened in August. The projects ending that month had a difficult time, probably due to a number of reasons: there is less media coverage during the summer; backers are probably away from their computer for a significant proportion of them; and somehow many studios decided to launch during that month, making it made it more complicated to get noticed.
This is just a small peek at the information, we will be able to go more in-depth in the coming months when time allows.
https://icopartners.com/newblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/gdc_2013.png256710Thomas BIDAUXhttps://icopartners.com/newblog/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CRUSHCREATIVE_ICO_BRANDING_LOGO_NavyWhite-01-e1586189748878.pngThomas BIDAUX2013-04-18 11:03:492014-09-29 10:24:25Indie Game Summit – GDC 2013: slides, raw data and extra thoughts
With Diane taking a much deserved break, I took on to write on the regular blog post on what we think are going to be the trends in our space for the coming year. Not to put her to shame, I decided to be even more late in delivering this than she usually is. It is also likely to be a different kind of look at the trends, hopefully, it will be equally interesting. If not, come back in a year.
On Platforms
Last year’s perspective from Diane on trends proved to be true and should continue very much in the same direction:
● PC games are doing better and better, being driven by online games as well as by the surprise phenomenon from last year, crowd funding. While the first ones are driving their growth through Free-to-Play business models and expending the game genres using them; the second ones, for their mast majority Pay-to-Play games have found a new breath with the ability to engage directly with users from the beginning, and monetize them quite early. It is interesting to see that in both cases, there is a dimension of modularity in how much you want to commit financially to the game. There would be much more to say on crowdfunding and where it can go this year, but I will keep it for another time, and for once, discuss more or less everything else.
● Mobile phones and tablets are in a very interesting place at the moment. With Android outgrowing iOS, the opportunities for games are expanding as well. There is still the issue of the fragmentation, but Samsung’s devices are performing well enough to make it a lesser concern for outfits that don’t want to spread themselves too thin. Both in Europe and in Asia, Android is now leading over iOS, making the current attempts at Android “consoles” (Ouya, Gamestick and the Shield are the 3 names I expect to see come up on a regular basis in the coming 6 months on the subject) that much more interesting, even though the success of those is very uncertain and will probably be dependent on a proper support from the retailers to have a chance to succeed. Regardless, this will help grow that part of the market. Most studios still have a very strong “iOS” first when they develop for mobile, still regularly skipping Android entirely. Fragmentation is one reason for this, but, probably more often, the more difficult monetisation is very central in that decision. If the platform keeps its current growth trend, that could well change to see more simultaneous launches or even Android first become more prevalent. There is still a long way to go though. I am very curious to see who is going to win the Social Graph party on mobile though. In Asia, Line and Kakaotalk are really advanced, eating Gree and DeNA’s breakfast on that segment, I haven’t seen a similar contender emerge in Europe (or in the US) at the moment. Whatsapp might be the closed at getting there, but they don’t seem to show any interest in gaming and users can very easily jump from one app social ecosystem to another, much more readily than they would on the web it seems. I would be very surprised that no Social Graph app emerges in the coming 12 months. There might be multiple ones for that matter, with a country per country market dominance, and if games are an excellent way for those to monetize.
● New consoles! Or not… I think I am getting very biased on consoles after years of avoiding them, sometimes actively (irrelevant to the games I am the most involved in), sometimes unconsciously (being a PC player personally). This new generation that is coming is not getting me excited. It will offer a lot more opportunities in the segment that interest us, online games, especially if they start to open a lot more to Free-to-Play business models. There are a few games already there, and they don’t hint at at a great experience for the studios. If only just for the total lack of control of components of the funnel, it is not going to be attractive to many existing providers of online games. What has been said so far (or seen if you include the Wii U) shows the manufacturer are aware of the trends of the market and are trying to integrate them in their offers (arguably, the video streaming on PS3 is less gimmicky than the touch screen of the Wii U controller), but fundamentally I feel like they will just cater to the audience the current-gen is targeting and a good chunk of that audience is satisfied by their existing consoles. It will offer games with better graphics and all, new iterations of key franchises, and they will do well for a while, but they won’t bring anything new and they won’t be able to integrate what they need to renew themselves. It will take a big change to the current plan for this to change.
● New hardware! This is *a lot* more exciting to me. The growth of the Android ecosystem, the greater access to funds and attention through crowd funding is creating opportunities for new hardware and experimentation in a segment that has been for a long time too complicated for an independent approach. Independent might be a stretch, but still the OUYA is basically a startup. Gamestick and nVidia Shield are coming from established companies, but going beyond what they have ever done before (or so it seems to me). The Occulus is mightily intriguing (I am obviously keeping a close eye on this one as Strike Suit Zero will be supporting it) and I feel that the opportunities of this kind are now a lot more accessible and they can easily create the surprise this year. Is someone going to finally crack the formula for a good game using NFC? Is Augmented Reality good for games? 3D printing anyone? What is cooking in some crazy minds that can totally change the deal? Software offers an infinite number of opportunities, opening to options to integrate some form of hardware more easily, it demultiplies what can be considered… In many ways, that was what made Activision successful with Guitar Hero and more recently with Skylanders, except now, you don’t necessarly need to be a large publisher.
Of Genres
● After spending a good time looking at the state of MMORPGs for our report on them, it is obvious to us that the market saturation is slowing the growth of that segment. The year has already started to see some consolidation with Gala Net Europe and North America being acquired by Webzen. There are still opportunities, but they won’t lie in extending a portfolio very quickly but rather by expanding on the genres, increasing the production value but also the game experience. The critical mass required along with the costs to make those games will still make said opportunities limited to a few studios and publishers.
● There is a lot of growth at the moment for session-online games. They offer a wider variety of game experiences, expanding the market and not competing so much with each other. They also tend to reach profitability quicker, sustaining the companies business over a long period of time. This said, some genres are busier than other, with FPS leading the charge and games from a wide range of quality level. Crytek and Trion will enter the fray this year with Warface, Splash Damage with Dirty Bomb, and I am very keen to see how they perform and how the landscape will change (or not) with an even bigger selection of games coming. At the end of the day, this has not much change from last year: more genres will emerge and will find their way to build sustainable businesses. They won’t all become block busters the way League of Legends and World of Tanks did for sure, but they don’t need to to be successful.
● eSport has been growing so fast this year, it seems like the industry is still playing catch up on this. It is definitely a difficult exercise to integrate eSport inside your project, people with experience are not that common and the complexity ecosystem of eSport itself, where you need to align the interests of the studio/publisher, the teams, the sponsors, the event organizers, the streaming solutions, the casters,this is not making it any easier. But it also means that the opportunities are equally numerous, on all levels. eSport will keep growing this year for sure, and hopefully we should witness a few breakthrough in terms of scale and how it gets structured, especially as the West is playing catch-up on Asian countries on this.
Of Other Things
● Well, mostly my mind is going toward merchandising as path for growth for the industry this year. It has very often been a monetization path that has been badly managed, even by some fairly major brands. However, two things are changing the situation. The first one is quite impressive examples of licensing done well: Rovio (worldwide); Moshi Monsters (UK); Dofus (France). They prove that it can be a profitable activity in itself (and honestly, if you are just breaking even, you are still doing very well considering the extra exposure it grants you). The second one is Kickstarter… again. After avoiding for years to get in the complexity to manufacture and distribute merchandising, studios of all sizes going to crowd funding are getting their hands dirty in order to raise the stakes and get the most money possible for their projects. And I am pretty sure the experience is not leaving them unmoved. Those two elements together are contributing to break down the passivity that the industry had toward merchandising while every other entertainment industries were properly tapping into it.
There are many other things I am probably not seeing (and Diane would be pointing at half a dozen others for sure), please share what you feel are the new directions the industry is going to take this year.
I will be talking at 2 events in the near future, in both occasions, it will be about crowd funding and Kickstarter. While this probably comprises less than 2% of my time, I think it makes feel event organizers that much more comfortable in inviting me talk about the topic.
I am not selling anything to the audience and I have no agenda when I come as a speaker. It makes me scratch the itch, so we are all winning in the end.
So, what’s cooking?
Music Futures – Crowdfunding
28th of February, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Yes. This is this week and this is not about videogames. However, the organiser invited me to share about the experience of running a successful Kickstarter project with Strike Suit Zero. I took the opportunity to have a look at how well the music projects are performing on Kickstarter and I will put the results on Slideshare as usual. The whole event is free, structure as a panel and we should have ample time to cover the topic as we won’t be confined on a one-hour format, which is a very good thing IMHO.
GDC Indie Game Summit – Crowdfunding for Indies: Real Numbers and Trends
25th of March, San Francisco
This is a short session (using the 25-min “TED Talk” format), so I won’t have the ability to go on and on about the topic. I will very likely stick to the numbers, and what they mean. Or more likely, what they used to mean 6 months ago and what they mean now. It will be less about sharing about the Strike Suit Zero specific, but you are very welcomed to catch me at the event and ask me directly.
And as a teaser for the upcoming data from the Newcastle event, I want to share the following, specifically about how well Kickstarter is performing in UK (or in GBP to be precise and as explained on the post about the topic). As I said, I have been looking at music projects recently. Added to the mix as well, I have started tracking Tabletop Games, both for my personal education and for a couple of projects I discussed with friendly companies.
Arguably, this data is very anecdotal but it is interesting to see how video games projects are performing in GBP comparatively to the other genres. Even if you ignore Godus and Elite, which both raised a large amount of money and had a fairly large impact on the data, the performance of video games in GBP is very good compared to Music and Tabletop. There are still very few projects that get financed, compared to USD projects. We are looking at almost a 10 to 1 ratio, but that still better than Music or Tabletop projects.
I believe that the Music industry has more viable alternatives for crowd funding and the fact it is steadily growing since the GBP launch is an excellent sign for the platform.
https://icopartners.com/newblog/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CRUSHCREATIVE_ICO_BRANDING_LOGO_NavyWhite-01-e1586189748878.png00Thomas BIDAUXhttps://icopartners.com/newblog/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CRUSHCREATIVE_ICO_BRANDING_LOGO_NavyWhite-01-e1586189748878.pngThomas BIDAUX2013-02-23 11:07:522014-09-17 10:11:27Upcoming conference presence (and Kickstarter in the UK part 2)
